“The dead. No more´n a breath. You let that last one go and you´re with them again.”

In the end the murder mystery is solved. But after “all the dying that summer” it is no longer important who the culprit was. The epilogue connects the deaths of Frank´s childhood with the present, where Frank picks up his old and frail father on Memorial Day. They drive to the cementry of New Bremen where they meet Frank´s brother Jake who lost his stammering after saying the “ordinary grace” at Ariel´s funeral feast. Together they visit the graves of all those who died in the summer of 1961 and of other family members including that of Ruth who died at 60 of breast cancer. The scene is perfect for reflecting what life is all about. And Ordinary Grace´s low key style leaves plenty of room for doing just that.

Bleeding Edge is not my friend, Ordinary Grace is. What I like about it is its matter-of-fact-narration and its unpretentiousness. Ordinary Grace´s beauty is its simplicity. What I also like is that its not a preachy book. Although Frank´s family is infused with Christianity Ordinary Grace does not promote Christianity as a solution for coping with loss and grieve. There is no easy solution, what life is all about we have to find out for ourselves. Christian values and beliefs may work for some, for others it´s music or Indian rituals.

]]>9Ian McCartneyhttp://manafonistas.de/?p=735012015-03-01T13:27:13Z2015-03-01T11:48:12ZI was listening to Boris Blank’s recent record Electrified, which then led me to an interview Blank did with The Quietus last October, in which he tells what his favourite albums are. There were some good surprises in there, including a single by The Normal (which he regards as an album), Miles Davis’ planet-shaking On The Corner and Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma.

The first two I am familiar with, but not Ummagumma. In the interview Blank says “the era with Syd Barrett, it’s beautiful music, but Ummagumma you can listen to today, it’s timeless. I have it on vinyl in my archives, although I have it loaded on my iPhone. It’s music that I take personally with me wherever I go.”

Intrigued, I give Ummagumma a go. But hey, I didn’t much like it – apart from Sysyphus (Part 3) and Grantchester Meadows. This listen then led me to check out Animals, which I’d never really heard before, although it does have probably the best cover of any record ever. Sad must be the fucker who ever got a train from London Victoria to someplace in Kent who didn’t look out the window and see Battersea Power Station and imagine a giant imaginary pig suspended in the air above it. So, Animals it is/was. Pigs 1, then Dogs.

Dogs starts off brilliantly – a soft guitar strum and hazy, opiated electronics. The singing is immense – there are a couple of cosmic vocal glissandi on this that wouldn’t be matched in popular music again until Bernard Sumner sang the word “anyone” about four and a half minutes into Try All You Want (1991) and Kanye West sang the word “neon” in Lift Off two decades later. The first Dogs cosmic glissando happens in the word “need” at the end of the first line: “You gotta be crazy, you gotta have a real need”. Amazing, like many orchardsful of apples falling in space. The second one occurs in the word style at the first line of the second verse: “And after a while, you can work on points for style”.

At 17 minutes, Dogs is too long – the section between about 3 and 7 minutes in is too pomp/prog. The cosmic space-out section between about 8 and 12 minutes works much better. Whole careers were based on former, why not the latter?

Lyrically there’s a lot of bite in the way “Dogs” attacks its target…

You gotta keep one eye looking over your shoulder.
You know it’s going to get harder
And harder, and harder as you get older.
And in the end you’ll pack up and fly down south,
Hide your head in the sand, just another sad old man,
All alone and dying of cancer.

… but is the target real or made of straw? Is Dogs muzzled by its own creeping existence-anxiety and fear of death? Either way, it’s an English classic.

The beautiful dirt you leave for me to find, is a paper trail
I follow, into the far north, working with brother Fred Gibson
on a songwriting master class with the youth of another town,
each one inspiring in their own right, pumped on enthusiasm
for the thing I love & how do I express the gratitude I feel
to be in the presence of their passion for music, going public
with their ideas, no matter how embarrassing, to see each one
overcome themselves reminds me of the kid I was, crushingly
self conscious, introverted, shy, unable to converse, couldn’t
meet anyone new without turning inside out. Music, was the only
route out’ve the dark hole, still is to this day & today,
listening to all these young dreams laid bare in company I was
lifted. Courage like that is an honour to witness, filled my
tank up, took me right back to the root of why I chose this road,
or did it choose me?, Lucky to be still here not only with loyal
friends of years, but welcomed into their circle of inspiration,
& new friends found along the road like Fred – today.
Wish you could’ve been there, heard their songs, every one of them
from the heart. Personal is the only way forward, no time to waste
on a life of imitation, sing what’s going on with you.
The more personal it is the more universal it becomes.
As we left this house, early in the rain, car loaded with studio
& more than a little trepidation, we both turned to one another,
bleary & spontaneously burst into grinning,

]]>3Ian McCartneyhttp://manafonistas.de/?p=734002015-02-27T22:47:19Z2015-02-27T22:39:05ZDoes music make you LOL?

Some songs are intented to produce mirth, like Tom Lehrer’s “National Brotherhood Week” which is funny almost in spite of itself. The humour is wry, the subject matter is actually pretty fucking serious. Then there’s out-and-out funny, like Georges Brassens perennially hilarious “Le Gorille”.

Both of these, though, come from a time when music hall and its French and American equivalents were still in memory, perhaps even still in fading existence. This means that the songs’ writing and presentation is fairly obvious in its intent – it was part of a tradition, even if it was diverging from the main body of that tradition.

As time moves on though, things get more and more meta*, with more and more layers of irony, some intended, some maybe not. I find it difficult not to like early albums by extreme metal bands like Celtic Frost and Venom. Both were masters of stagecraft, and both had singers who sang in English “West Country” accents, like roaring pirates – despite neither band being from the West Country- Celtic Frost were from Zürich, Venom were from Newcastle.

The 1984 film This is Spinal Tap was probably intended as satire, as a skewering of rock pretension. A metal piss-take. For me, though, Spinal Tap is a success because it failed to do that. How could you satirise imagination and a sense of playfulness as expansive as Venom and Celtic Frost had? Their art was in itself largely satirical. Spinal Tap was more like cinema cottoning on to the fact that metal – while dark and dealing in heaviness, also had a genuine sense of humour. You could hardly miss it really.

One of the most meta works I can think of is Frank Zappa’s “Broadway The Hardway”, and in particular the song “Any Kind of Pain”. It’s amazing to think that this wonderful episode of R&B – with its great singing, virtuosic playing, sense of melody close to Todd Rundgrens finest work – is a 100% piss take. Seems a waste of melodic chops somehow. The song’s themes are venality/vapidity on the innocent side of things, and control/cynicism on the other. It’s like Zappa just throws this binary into the air, watches it fly for a bit, then lets it explode into meaning: “she only gets half the blame/ unless we extend her”. At the end of the song, comedy has curdled – and the vapid character is now shrouded in pathos. Like much of Zappa, there is a micro-operatic story going on. Complete fucking genius.

Sometimes the comedy in music comes from juxtaposition. (Note: I hate having to use the word juxaposition, but sometimes you have to.) “Giftwrap Yourself, Slowly!” is a great and funny title by Porn Sword Tobacco from the album New Exclusive Olympic Heights. The title, as an imperative, seems to be about valuing oneself, about realising one’s value in the eyes of a sympathetic (significant) other. But it’s also strongly reminiscent of (even if not referencing) “The Gift” by The Velvet Underground:

He would ship himself parcel post special
delivery. The next day Waldo went to the supermarket
to purchase the necessary equipment. He bought
masking tape, a staple gun and a medium sized
cardboard box, just right for a person of his build.
He judged that with a minimum of jostling he could
ride quite comfortably. A few airholes, some water, a
selection of midnight snacks, and it would probably be
as good as going tourist.

… and we all know how that one ends. In “Giftwrap Yourself, Slowly” the LOL is in the juxtaposition of the neatly crafted phrase of the title – it reads like a billboard in space – with the sombre music of the track itself, like tears in slow motion rain at the start of a Byung-chun Min film.

Porn Sword Tobacco have a lot of funny song names. Other favourites include “Carl Zeiss Driving to Work” which brings to mind Billy Connolly’s joke about prescription windscreens, and “Futuristic Rasta Money” whose three words collide so brilliantly, saying a hell of a lot and nothing at all: another billboard in space. Also “Copyright, The Universe” and the succinct, trenchant two-word novel of a title “Freedom Commercial”. Oh, and finally “I Love Riding My Bicycle” whose prosaic-ness is the funny: it has to be the third part of an unrelated triptych that started with Kraftwerk’s “Tour de France” and Boards of Canada’s “Happy Cycling”.

*Meta – creative work referring to itself or to the conventions of its genre. I use it adjectivally. I don’t know if the dictionary does, and don’t much care. Ha!